A thousand years.
Everyone knew they had only a thousand years.
It was a brief trial of time.
It would test their talent and the limits of their wisdom! Once those thousand years were up, they would return to this palace with their respective plans and explain their visions for the universe's future, thereby determining their chances of reaching the Eleventh-Order.
This was already the fairest arrangement, and everyone accepted it.
It was not merely Proving the Dao with Goodness; it was also the most direct test of a person's most fundamental talent and wisdom, the very core of what made them strong.
Rustle, rustle.
The crowd dispersed.
A thousand years might seem long, but calculated within High-Dimensional Space-Time, it amounted to no more than ten days—a mere blink of an eye.
Everyone vanished from the palace. Xu Zhi rose as well, disappearing from where he stood and arriving in the vast emptiness high above the universe for a leisurely walk.
The Great Universe in the distance grew smaller and smaller.
"The universe truly is wondrous. Looking across the entire course of history: Heaven and Earth Creation, the harmonization of rules with the Dao, complete maturity, and then the arrival of the Eleventh-Order."
"Viewed as a whole, the history of the universe is like a living being: birth, infancy, growth, maturity, childbirth—and it only gives birth to ten children."
"Every Eleventh-Order is a child of truth born from the Great Universe's singularity. They are immature living singularities of truth, inhabited by the universe's most outstanding geniuses. They can develop and grow at any time, eventually becoming vast, complete mature universes that have lost their own wills."
"From that perspective, birth, reproduction, and then death seem like a perfect law of life."
"It is like an immense cosmic hymn running beneath